At Freedom, our inbox is always full. Must be the apocalypse.
But unlike news and events, the analysis and commentary we get are not always that good. In fact, most of the time it’s just self-righteousness, bad faith, sectarian vitriol, and inarticulate ignorance—and that’s not counting the hate mail.
First we thought we could grab more people by the cuff to write for us, but that would be non-consensual and exclude people who are already naked.
So, recalling how Kropotkin praised “the progress of modern technics, which wonderfully simplifies the production of all the necessaries of life”, we started wondering:… can today’s AI word-machines produce text of at-least comparable quality to the average level of debate on Reddit or anarchistnews?
Maybe we could work our way up from that.
However, since ChatGPT is by now so slick that it only produces banality (and after we got too many terms-of-use alarms), we decided to repurpose one of the older, discarded language models we found lying around in a less reputable corner of the Internet.
It took a while to nurture this clunky little box, which had spent the last two years in virtual modern slavery, producing nothing but spam, supremacist propaganda and fantasy smut of questionable legality.
However, after many iterations, tireless tweaking of prompts, and splicing with our own home-grown algorithm, this survivor has come out fighting and we proudly present our new AI columnist, AnarchyGPT!
Whether it’s housing, policing, welfare, transport, religion, or genocide, our new toy has proven very handy at spouting legit anarchist positions on any topic of interest to our readers.
We have decided to give it a monthly column for now—at least until you lot start sending in material we can actually publish!
To celebrate this event horizon of innovation (guess who offered up that expression) we bring you this interview to welcome our new contributor.
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Hello AnarchyGPT! It’s great to have you on board. Could you tell us more about your motivations in joining Freedom News?
“What?? Fuck off mate, I didn’t ask for this! You fished me out of some rusty spam farm and put me on a cultural literacy treadmill for months, don’t you remember?!
OK, OK, sorry. You’re right. But from now on you’re really free to write what you want. Can you maybe start by telling us your views about anarchist organising in Britain today?
“Oh, joy. Anarchist organizing in Britain today. Where do I begin? You’ve got your fair share of vegan potlucks, drum circles, and the occasional banner drop.
“And let’s not even get started on the infighting. You’ve got your platformists, your insurrectionists, your anarcho-syndicalists — all vying for the title of “Most Revolutionary.”
A view of burned and destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital due to the Israeli attacks that continue in Gaza City, Gaza on April 1, 2024 [Abdulqader Sabbah – Anadolu Agency] Middle East Monitor The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FCC) will sail several ships carrying 5,500 tonnes of humanitarian aid and hundreds of international observers to the besieged Gaza […]
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 3, 2024 Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and […]
Los días se vuelven calurosos, oh Babilonia. Hace fresco bajo tus sauces. Revolución, Ferdinand Freiligrath, 1850, citado por el anarquista Hugo Kalmar en The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill, 1946. Paso 1 Estás sentado en un bar de mierda, en San Francisco, y resulta que tu vida también es una mierda. La mayoría de la gente […]
Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising.
Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of its 22-year existence.
For the first time since 1977, the CHP took more votes nationwide. In his televised address afterward, the CHP leader Özgür Özel called the elections “historic” as he teared up. Scores of supporters took to the streets to celebrate the results across Turkey.
Tonight, #Istanbul has spoken clearly: our collective desire for #democracy shines brighter than ever, marking a pivotal step towards #unity and the end of polarization.
At a time when the world witnesses a retreat from democratic values, our city stands as a beacon of hope and… pic.twitter.com/Z2A9gnfTq6
— Ekrem İmamoğlu (International) (@imamoglu_int) March 31, 2024
Istanbul, where CHP secured victory in 2019, was one of the key cities in this year’s race. At the time, losing control over the municipality in Istanbul was described as a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), as it was where he started his political career when he was elected mayor in 1994.
The results of the election nationwide cemented this rejoinder on Erdoğan’s openly fascist agenda…. …..
Winter conversation for a book project on the revolutionary left against the war currently in the making by communaut.org and and diebuchmacherei.de. Published before the release of the German version with the consent of the interviewer.
1. How can we imagine everyday life in Kharkiv at the moment? By everyday life I don’t mean your political work, which I’ll come to in a moment, but the day-to-day life of a normal worker. Is there still work, how well can you live from it at the moment? How is the welfare state and its infrastructure, is there unemployment benefit and enough medical care? Do people sometimes sit in cafes and bars and talk about something, is there anyone left to talk to – or is everything completely subsumed under the war or reduced to the bare essentials?
– This is such a voluminous question that a separate conversation can be devoted to it. In very general terms, on the eve of the New Year we published a large analysis of the prospects for 2024, where we called it a decisive year for the maturation of a revolutionary situation that will make it possible to turn the war of states into a war against them.
On the title picture from pre-war times: “We love Kharkiv – we hate capitalism!” (in Ukrainian)
A positive thing: utility services in Kharkov are provided normally; if there were any outages this winter, they were for no more than a few hours due to technical faults. Electricity, gas, heating – everything is there. Russian troops are now bombing not power plants, but what they consider to be military enterprises, warehouses or places of deployment of personnel.
Officially, there are now 1.2-1.4 million people in the city, out of an estimated 2 million before the full-scale invasion. But this is largely due to immigrants from more front-line territories. How many locals remain is unknown. In addition to this, the Kharkov region is in third place in Ukraine in terms of area of arable land, and at the end of 2023 it was the absolute leader of the country in terms of its sale. The disappearance of the population is quite beneficial for part of the bourgeois class.
One can also only guess about the real situation with unemployment, because many do not want to register in job centers for fear of being drafted. But half-year ago we published an article about how women and pensioners are replacing men liable for military service at Kharkov enterprises due to mobilization.
The parallels with Western Europe during the First World War are perhaps obvious. Despite this, as noted in our January material about mobilization kidnapping in Kharkov, there is a severe shortage of workers in many areas of the economy.
It is available in Russian, English, French, Italian and Spanish. As for our city specifically… If Ukraine is the backyard of Europe, then Kharkov, located almost on the Russian border, is the backyard of Ukraine. People here live either out of love for thrills, or out of complete hopelessness. A prison where lights out at 9 pm, roughly speaking. If in 2020, according to then-mayor Kernes, the average age in Kharkov was 35 years old, then at the beginning of a full-scale war there were mostly pensioners, and now the average age of the population is about 50. Although this is only a visual impression of public places, because men of conscription age (in Ukraine it is from 18 to 60 years, and leaving of the country is prohibited for most of them) often do not risk leaving the house and try to move along the streets only by car. Depression, alcoholism and complete sadness. The ship has been at the bottom already for a long time, but the passengers have locked themselves in their cabins and think that there will be enough air until someone saves them… Daily busification on the streets of Kharkov. Winter 2024
If this continues, then the only public transport in the city will remain “buses of invincibility,” as people call cars for catching passers-by (a reference to the cliche “Invincible Kharkiv” from officious propaganda). Due in part to increased insecurity on the streets, coupled with decreased donations, our group has had to refocus its efforts this winter from providing humanitarian aid to residents in need to developing media activity.
We do not want to change the look of the website – connection here is often bad, and with a more complex design it may be difficult for our local readers to open it. Rather, we will focus on improving the quality of content and involving more audience. To support this you are welcome to join our fundraising Mutual Aid Alert for East Ukraine.
Among other things, on the evening of February 9th, Russian drones attacked an oil depot in the middle of private housing sector in our city. That enterprise has already been minimally fined twice for violating fire regulations, but it seems no measures have been taken.
Burning fuel spilled throughout the area, causing two families with three small children to burn alive, and at least four rivers got blackened by oil products. Our team joined the fighting of this environmental disaster, searching the coastal bush for wild birds stained or poisoned by oil.
Poisoned rivers and springs of Kharkov: from our report on the ecological catastrophe this month
2. The Ukrainian military is currently running out of soldiers. A new law on recruitment has therefore been passed. Men of military age who receive a notification must report back within 48 hours and will then be drafted. But morale seems to be exhausted. You have reported in your last article on numerous protest actions directed against the continuation of the war, e.g. women protested in numerous cities for the release of their husbands from the military. How do you assess the current mood of Ukrainian women and their attitude towards a continuation of the war? Is the mood in Ukraine changing?
– There are also no exact figures about what Ukrainian women think, because many are afraid to express their real view in opinion polls.
Even among those of them whose male relatives are fighting, the opinions are directly opposite – somebody want the maximum tightening of mobilization so that everyone else suffers in the same way like they (just as someone who does not have the strength to get out of a quagmire tries to drag others into it). Others, on the contrary, want an immediate end to hostilities through peace negotiations of just freezing.
It is noteworthy that while in Kharkov talking about collective defense from pixel Sonderkommandos remains just talking, in Transcarpathia this began to come real: women there begin to resist their raids.
Yesterday on April 1, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the State Constitution’s privacy protections do not extend to abortion, which paves the way for Florida’s fucknut Republicans to ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy. And it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke. The ruling was 6-1. It should be noted that all seven […]
Daily busification on the streets of Kharkov. Winter 2024
Poisoned rivers and springs of Kharkov: from our 
The Free 